There's a line in the third book of the Strain trilogy that's stuck with me since I first read it. The book, if you don't know the series, is called "The Night Eternal" and is basically about the world being ruled by vampires. (Season four, if you watched the FX tv series.)
Anyway, in the book, when everything is awful and everyone knows they're basically screwed, it's mentioned that, after the initial chaos of vampires taking over, things seemed to almost go back to normal. Things weren't normal. No one was safe. Monsters were literally everywhere. But people still went to work during the day. Still came home in the evening. Still went to bed at night and still woke up to repeat the cycle the next day.
I remember wondering how the characters could think something like that. How could anything feel normal when everything is so hellish?
The tv show did something kind of similar (they just made it more outright hellish than it was in the book).
But now I'm watching it happen in real time. People are being taken away. Women are being forced to have children. The rich, powerful, and privileged are in control of everything and do whatever they want without consequence.
I think the differences between how the book and the show handled the strigoi's victory is the difference between what life under a fascist regime actually looks like compared to how we think it looks like.
